expat+HAREM, the global niche

With/out borders

Anastasia Ashman — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 05:23:48 +0000

By SEZIN KOEHLER

Border disputes never made sense to me. Living all over the world, first due to my mother’s job and then by choice as an adult, gave me a free floating perception of the world.

I’ve watched how arbitrary lines — drawn on maps by retreating colonial powers — lead to war, civil strife, and genocide. They’re theoretical yet defended violently. As a child I lived in India and Pakistan, both nations still fighting today over the ownership of Kashmir. The 32-year-old civil war in Sri Lanka for a separatist Tamil state came to a bloody end only last year.

Zuzu Kahlo by S.Koehler

Perhaps a lack of physical boundaries contributes to porous personal boundaries.

I speak my mind without hesitation, fling myself into new friendships with the enthusiasm of a child. Openness has allowed me to connect deeply but I’ve also shed many a tear assuming the best when the person was far from it.

Now I’m confined by the borders of the Czech Republic, a place that doesn’t agree with me, and I have no option to move in the near future. Is it a coincidence I’m learning how to set personal boundaries? Not so quick with new friendships. Learning to wear a smile even if I don’t feel it. Saving my commentary for people I trust.

I’ve also begun adapting my natal chart readings to include Astrocartography, location-based astrology to understand how mapped spaces reflect the planets and their rotations. Meanwhile, Frida Kahlo and Lady Gaga inspire me to explore the various facets of my visual identity as I map my own physical borders through the hybrid/MONSTER sideshow.

How have physical borders, or the lack of them, shaped your personal ones?
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Sezin Koehler is a half-American half-Sri Lankan global nomad/horror novelist whose first novel, American Monsters, was released this year.
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The customer is sometimes wrong

Anastasia Ashman — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 04:21:50 +0000

By CATHERINE SALTER BAYAR

“I don’t care where the doll is made. I want a cheaper price,” the young American woman drawled.

She and her mother had spent half an hour agonizing over selecting pairs of Turkmen dolls we sell in our Sultanahmet shop. I explained these figures are locally handmade by the women of a family we partner with, not made in China.

Family portrait by CSBayar

“I collect dolls and know what they’re worth,” she’d replied. “Why, I bought a large doll in Mexico last year for $100.”

I recognized that bit of twisted logic: the economies of all emerging countries (or anywhere outside the US or Europe) should be alike.

“Fine, try your luck at Wal-Mart,” I wanted to say, but sarcasm isn’t the best sales tactic.

“Mom, I’m sure Mehmet at the hotel will know where to take us for good dolls.”

He will. Vendors perpetually sell at cost or below to move their goods, a squeeze that eventually puts them out of business. I’d rather wait to sell mine to someone who cares about supporting the local makers.

Buy locally, think globally is a concept still tough to grasp. In my clothing industry career, I learned the true cost of sending jobs offshore so consumers could buy for rock-bottom prices. Decades later, Americans are realizing the backbone of the middle class — manufacturing — barely exists in their country.

How have your consumption habits changed, based on where you live — or the products you create?

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California native Catherine Salter Bayar creates knitwear, seeks textile treasure, and has left her house on Ayasuluk Hill for a room in Istanbul’s Sultanahmet. She writes about it all in her upcoming book, Weaving Our Way Home.
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Immigration immunity

Anastasia Ashman — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 04:35:08 +0000

By FIGEN ÇAKIR

Immigration has become top of the agenda for many nations. In news from the UK I sense growing indignation, issues and arguments. Initially, I’m sad the face of Britain is changing. Then suddenly it hits me. What am I, then?

Does my excuse of “love-destiny-job-retirement” make me more worthy of taking up space elsewhere than desperate people seeking refuge and a future?

The Last of England by Ford Madox Brown

The deeper I dig the more I realize few can actually insist they’re not immigrants. Who really comes from a static line of ancestry? Who hasn’t a family legend about discovery, journey, persecution or war?

Colonization has managed to uproot or wipe out people who would still be living right where they originated had they been left alone. Now we have tribal wonders to gaze at like in a zoo.

So if we embark on global citizenship or retire to warm tax-free climes why get so righteous about immigration at home? Are we simply intimidated by the numbers?

Once we become expats do we earn a badge of tolerance toward other cultures — all of a sudden?

Clearly not. Some expats carry their own culture on their backs, throwing it down where they stop and getting indignant with ‘the locals’ when they don’t absorb it. Some refuse to speak the local lingo.

Why are expats living for decades in a completely different culture while still retaining their racial and cultural disdain? Isn’t the world supposed to thrive and be more beautiful in it’s diversity than in it’s uniformity?

Can we accept each geography for what it gives us, rather than what we bring to it?

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British-born interior designer Figen Çakır has her own design label, where for the last four years she has been combining Turkish raw fibers and ancient arts with innovative ideas to create functional products for fiber artists.
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Great White People Book Club

Anastasia Ashman — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 14:30:48 +0000

Announcing HYBRID AMBASSADORS: a blog-ring project of Dialogue2010
You met our multinational cultural innovators this spring in a roundtable discussion of hybrid life at expat+HAREM. Now in these interconnected blog posts they share reactions to a recent polarizing book promotion at the writing network SheWrites. Join the discussion on Twitter using #HybridAmbassadors or #Dialogue2010

By ANASTASIA ASHMAN

We’re suffering from a false sense of cosmopolitanism. Access to the worldwide Interwebs leads us to imagine ourselves global thinkers. But we’re not — unless we’re true xenophiles, bridging cultures, immersed and knowledgeable about multiple worlds.

Most people hang out in “like-minded microcosms” and when we cross a boundary online the new light shed on everyone’s prejudices and assumptions can take us by surprise.

“Xeno-confusion” is happening more often in the virtual world, like this stumble into unfamiliar territory. Viewed through the lens of American civil politics, an American company’s skin whitening product campaign on Facebook targeting Indians raised an anticolonialist uproar — but not from the Indians. (No similar protests reported for popular self tanners that darken the skin.)

The launch of TEDWomen, a conference examining the effect of women and girls on the world’s future, created its own online culture shockwave. Are we all on the same page, North American feminists blogged here and here and here, wondering if a gathering separate from the main TED event to discuss the impact of womankind is brilliant or belittling. A blog sought a more nuanced perspective and tried the group replacement test, substituting one marginalized group for another. Imagine TEDGay. TEDMinority. TEDPoor.

Recently in a 10,000-person international network for women writers I found myself in an alternate online reality. An author asked the general community of “White people” (sic) to promote her new work, sight unseen besides a short synopsis, because booksellers relegate titles by black authors like her to a separate section and that negatively affects sales.

Her book substance-free promotion was at odds with how and why people share information and recommendations about books, even marginalized, discriminated against writers. Instead she let everyone know she “loves White people” and her “Spanish husband looks white on the street”.

A majority of the responses were “Sure, I’ll do that for you.” I expressed my confusion. Why was she talking to us like we were part of the problem? Why not normalize the work by taking it off the margins and offer to show it to those of us fellow writers who want to review it in our respective media and communities?

What a baffling corner of the Internet: a place where I’m addressed like a person who normally chooses reading material based on the author’s skin color — that would be dumbly racist, no? — someone who today can be convinced to promote a title (to my Great White People Book Club) based on the original poster’s shelving problems at the bookstore and the-more-palatable-to-me skin tone of her husband glimpsed from afar.

Does it matter that there is definitively no such thing as a White people, or a Great White People Book Club, or that the motivation for word of mouth marketing requires a product to be “extremely helpful, interesting, unique, or valuable to a specific niche market”? Not in that particular microcosm, a place running on logic inherently foreign to me.

In this SheWrites universe I don’t even need to do a group replacement test (“Rich people”, “Powerful people”, “Beautiful people”) to know someone imagines it’s that easy to butter me up for their own purpose.

We may believe we’re global thinkers, and not be. But we’ve got other challenges. To be a global thinker demands we navigate and find a way to bridge worlds that might make only a sinister kind of sense.

As a xenophile, where online do you stumble?
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Anastasia Ashman is a California-born writer/producer of neoculture entertainment based in Istanbul. This series covers what’s crossing the mind and desk of expat+HAREM’s founder.
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More thoughts on this subject from my fellow HYBRID AMBASSADORS:

Sezin Koehler ~ Whites Only?
Rose Deniz ~ Voice Lessons from a Hybrid Ambassador
Catherine Yiğit ~ Special-ism
Tara Lutman Ağaçayak ~ Circles
Catherine Bayar ~ Thicker Skin
Judith van Praag ~ We Write History Today
Elmira Bayraslı ~ The Color of Writing
Jocelyn Eikenburg ~ The Problem with ‘Chinese Food’

Gender bending with James Chartrand

Anastasia Ashman — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 06:08:46 +0000

Introducing our new interview series: we’ll be sharing talks we’ve had with localized foreigners, outsiders on the inside, hybrid characters of all kinds. Suggest a person for us to interview (or someone you want to grill)!

Today we’re chatting with James Chartrand, head of the web design and copywriting outfit Men With Pens. He’s a successful online entrepreneur from Québec, Canada — and he’s a woman.

In breaking the news last year James credited her professional gender shift three years ago to vastly improved freelance opportunities in the virtual marketplace.

e+H: James, when and why did you think donning a male-sounding pseudonym for your online ventures might give you better results?

Early on, I had wanted to expand from solo freelancing into a team agency that could handle volume. I wanted anonymity for the hiring, and I wanted to be treated as a client, not as a writer peer hiring others – I chose a male name for the experience.

The level of respect I received was astounding. I adopted the male name in my own quotes and proposals to clients. Suddenly people listened to ideas, when previously they discredited them. My quotes were rarely haggled over and accepted at face value. In fact, I raised my rates substantially.

It seemed like a total business win – so I just kept up with it!

e+H: How easy/difficult was it to play this role? What considerations did you count as pros, as cons?

I have no personal attachments to my work or business, and so could separate the two without difficulty. I work in an online-only environment, so I didn’t have to meet anyone face to face or take calls, which added an extra level of easy.

The pros? More money, more respect, more credibility and being taken seriously.

The cons came later on as I grew in popularity and fame. I couldn’t attend events or seminars as James and had to turn down a few opportunities that would have increased my success. When pushed for calls, I had to refuse – or go ahead with them, and risk that the person on the other end of the line might react badly. They never did, though, and always laughed.

e+H: What changes did you notice in how you viewed yourself?

I am myself, regardless of what label I use, so my personality and identity never changed. I behaved the same, I used the same language, I made the same moves and I pursued the same opportunities as I would have had I used my own name.

People seem to believe I adopted a new persona – I just adopted a new name, that’s all.

Gender bending at hybrid/MONSTER: Mr. Zuzu by S.Koehler

e+H: Did being James spill over into your actual world life?

I’d say it was more the inverse – being myself spilled over into “the world of James”. Several people commented on how well I listened, how easy I was to talk to, how in touch with my feelings I seemed to be – all traits that are commonly associated with women. A few asked whether I was gay, which always made me laugh.

e+H: What male-only culture were you exposed to as James?

This is a really good question, and the first time I’ve been asked this – well done. ”Male-only” is extremely limited and very niche – it would mean I would have had to be invited to an “all boys” club, and I wasn’t.

Male dominated, though, is another story. I can say that the writing and freelancing industry is largely male dominated, with most big-name copywriters being men. Most A-list bloggers are male as well, as Technorati has reported for several years.

So I did find myself at a business level where there weren’t many women, yes. Managing it was simple – I have a good head for business, I knew what I wanted and I pursued the opportunities and chances that came along.

e+H: Did being James require you to act or think in any way differently?

I had to be careful about the pronouns I used…and what I shared of my private life or admitted in public. I’d tweet something that seemed perfectly fine to me (for example, that I knew how to knit!), and I’d get an email from a close friend who would say, “Your slip is showing…”

But again, each time, this only went to prove how much gender bias people have – many men know how to knit, for example, and do so very well. Why should they hide a particular talent from people in shame of being seen as “girlie”?

James Chartrand

e+H: What parallels can you draw in the rest of your life?

John Smith is treated much differently than Indigo Rodriguez. A French nurse is treated differently than an English one. A gay man (or woman) is treated differently than a straight one. We’re even treated differently because of the clothes we wear, what our faces look like or which music we like to listen to.

Many like to deny it and say it doesn’t exist, but when you accept the possibility is there and start to watch for it, you’ll quickly realize that we all judge books by their covers, and that it’s hard to overcome that. My most open-minded of friends realized that they too have biases and assumptions – and some of them frankly irrational.

e+H: James, thanks for sharing your story with expat+HAREM. Now a question for our readers — do you judge people based on their name?

Supraculture: August newsletter

Anastasia Ashman — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 12:31:59 +0000

[This was sent to our newsletter subscribers in August 2010. If you'd like to receive our newsletters directly, sign up here]

Welcome to August’s “Supraculture” issue.

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EDITOR’S NOTE

So much fun this month name-calling and finding our true neighborhood in supraculture. Dropping hints for your soundtrack of placelessness.

Announcing the emergence of a great new voice with whom we’re exploring the existential anxiety of being people like us.

Lots of things to do: besides sharing your thoughts on tipping points and tour groups, you’re invited to participate in a once-in-a-lifetime creative project on 11/11/11 with people from 196 countries, in 2,000 languages. It promises to be “the greatest story ever told.”

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YOUR THOUGHTS

Let us know what you’d ask the expat+HAREM community.

We asked for the names you give our global nichery –

is it a subculture like nudists and skateboarders and Burning Man (which sound like the same thing, snarf!), or is this diverse life we lead a transcendent supraculture above and beyond it all?

Some replies (keep them coming): Homeless. Geoagnostic. Nomadology.

“Worldburgers is what I call people like us,” offers Judith van Praag, a Dutch writer/designer in Seattle and a Dialogue2010 cultural innovator.

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AT expat+HAREM

This month we discussed the tipping point of cultural assimilation and its confusions (can a soapy television show trigger a shift in your identity?). We also confided what the ancient history of a place has made us do (like fall down a Turkish mountain when the past won’t meet us in a more convenient spot, or innovate new business based on heritage techniques). Being contradictory types, we continue to debate whether our travel styles — ultraspecialized tour group, herdlike mass transport, or loner on a new landscape — reflect larger life choices or simply what it takes to get us somewhere else on the planet.

Our Facebook group wall is now a perfect place to highlight your latest identity adventure: friends and fans are invited to post your blog/site link, and tell us all what awesomeness you’ve been up to.

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AROUND THE WORLD & AROUND THE WEB

We’re not alone. In fact, here’s another vote for supraculture: we’re thrilled to witness a like-minded movement building online in the inaugural hybridology conference call by Amna Ahmad of The Pragmatic Hybrid. Addressing “the existential anxiety of our hybrid lives,” she says we’re looking for models of courage/integrity in smart/fascinating people “who do eleven things that don’t seem to have anything in common.” Sound familiar?

Good guide to creating an earthy soundscape: the world music reviews at Perceptive Travel, the online magazine by book authors on the move. Personally, they had us at “remixed desert blues” Tuareg-style, and “placeless internationalism”.

Among the luminaries we met at TEDGlobal last month: the founder of 11ElevenProject, a day-long time capsule which aims to be the biggest creative project in human history — bringing the world together through film, photography, art, sound and music — to celebrate our individuality, and honor our common humanity. Plan to participate.

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Supraculturalfragilisticly yours,
(try it, it’s fun!)

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MISS LAST MONTH?

Check out July’s “Cool”
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Death at a distance

Anastasia Ashman — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 06:11:09 +0000

By CATHERINE YIĞIT

“Cast a cold Eye/On Life, on Death.”– William Butler Yeats

In over eight years living abroad I’ve lost two uncles, a grandmother and an aunt, in addition to many acquaintances. I didn’t make it home to any funeral.

For people like me there may be no choice but to heed that Dublin poet’s cold-eyed epitaph. At some point the long-term expat must face death. It could be an acquaintance, celebrity, or worst of all, friend or family member. Whatever the degree of closeness, we become aware that home has diminished; the web of friendship centered on the deceased has lost its node.

Memorial by CYigit

I didn’t make it to the funerals but I attended anyway.

I followed the rites, watched the coffin close, followed the removal to the church, the funeral mass the following day and finally the burial. I shed tears with the family and dropped a rose onto the coffin six foot under. I witnessed the family reunions that any funeral becomes; sandwich in one hand, pint or cup of tea in the other.

The Turkish tradition of quick burial seems rushed, there’s barely time for the body to cool. Sensible in the hot climates where Islam was born, but to someone from a culture with a wake it leaves too little time to adjust, too little time to say goodbye.

And what about when the ritual isn’t followed? What then?

This death-at-a-distance wraps me in a cocoon.

I realize how selfish my sheltered grieving is. I am not there to help, to search, to listen, to share, to support. I am not there.

How do you cope with death-at-a-distance?

In loving memory of Brecan Mooney 1978-2009.

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Catherine Yiğit is a native of Dublin, Ireland and writes from Çanakkale, northwestern Turkey where she lives with her Turkish husband and two children.
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Running from the pack

Anastasia Ashman — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 05:59:07 +0000

By CATHERINE SALTER BAYAR

Here’s my idea of travel torture: Sabotaging a holiday by overpaying someone to impose an itinerary on me.

Visiting 45 countries, I’ve never gone with a tour group, never sailed on a cruise ship. Perhaps I’m allergic to pack mentality because I was born in a tourist town, and have lived in places on touristy top-ten lists my whole life. I dislike being stuck in the company of people “from home” for the same reason I’m uncomfortable in the suburbs: the homogeneity stifles me.

Now on a warm Sunday afternoon, my neighborhood in Istanbul’s old peninsula offers two group extremes. In the convoluted lanes outside Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar, I observe the crowds of local bargain-hunting families. The hawkers are expressive, the mood festive. It’s a day to relax, enjoy each other’s company, and eat a meal together away from home.

In nearby Sultanahmet the mood is frantic. Crowds of sight-seeing tourists are prodded along by their assertive guides. There’s much to see and so little time!

Looming cruise ship by CSBayar

The point of travel is to encounter new cultures, see the world from a different perspective, feel the discomfort of being the only one like you around.

The sameness I avoid in travel also became tiresome when living outside my birth culture, in a small town with restrictive family ties.

Unlike those Grand Bazaar shoppers, my husband and I are black sheep. We prefer the anonymity that huge cities provide, the independence to stand out or blend in as we choose. We’re happiest in a crossroads of cultures, with the Babel of languages in our ears.

How does your travel philosophy reflect your other life choices?
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California native Catherine Salter Bayar creates knitwear, seeks textile treasure, and has left her house on Ayasuluk Hill for a room in Istanbul’s Sultanahmet. She writes about it all in her upcoming book, Weaving Our Way Home.
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In the face of history

Anastasia Ashman — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 06:27:30 +0000

By JOE CLARKE

Coming from the U.K. to live by the Mediterranean has been an escape to something new: the incredibly old.

My wife, an ancient languages scholar, can read Luwian, the tongue of an obscure civilisation that made its home here in Cilicia.

It’s different in London. History crowds you. It jostles your drinking arm and spills your pint. Celtic hordes shove you on Oxford Street, Norman policeman move you along and Saxon shop keepers ignore you. Shakespeare edits the local gazette, Dr Johnson corrects your language at school and Pepys sells you slightly charred parmesan cheese.

In Rough Cilicia, history waits for you to find it. It camps in the mountains, enjoying the view. It lies in the sea, letting the waves wash away the millennia. It sits by rivers and under cliffs and in the cool of caves. It watches you. It remembers Cleopatra’s beauty and Alexander’s ambition.

Adam Kayalar by J.Clarke

The remote history of Anatolia has made me risk my neck to get to it.

Take Adam Kayalar. I drive up a small mountain road. Park in a clearing. Descend steps cut into a sheer rock face two thousand years ago and repaired only where crampons and ropes would be needed. Immaculate round holes are cut where more sensible people placed handrails. Fifteen minutes of falling down a mountain I come to a ledge, twenty foot wide.

Look up. Carved into the inaccessible rock face above me are Roman reliefs, celebrating the dead. Warriors, mothers, families, hunters, children.

This was the site of an ancient death cult. In the glorious sunlight, with a view of a valley cutting its way down to the sea, the location acknowledges death in the face of life and celebrates life in the face of death.

What has ancient history in a new place made you do?

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Joe Clarke figures his Irish roots and Turkish citizenship make him a London Irish Turk. The London native lives in Tasucu with his wife and daughter, teaches English at a local school and misses his eldest daughter still in England.
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Expat. Immigrant. Assimilant.

Anastasia Ashman — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 05:36:36 +0000

By VALERIE TAŞIRAN

How to describe my life since I moved to Istanbul with my Turkish husband? I’ve gotten my citizenship paperwork in order, and learned enough Turkish to comfortably describe myself as fluent. What I can’t do, in any language, is describe myself.

Happy to be a Turk by V.Taşıran

‘Immigrant’ is the first possibility, and easiest to dismiss. It sounds somehow off to my American ear in this country with, at least in modern times, a much stronger tradition of emigration than immigration. Here the term carries so much less political weight than it does in the U.S. It also seems overly dramatic for a person who returns to her country of origin twice a year.

Note I don’t say I return home twice a year. That disqualifies ‘expat’ as a descriptor. Turkey is home now in a way that the U.S. is not. I miss my family, Target, and Cherry Coke, but I have no plans to live there, and with dual citizenship I don’t fit conventional definitions of the expatriate.

Claiming to be assimilated, too, is problematic.

Even after seven years, it seems there’s no clear tipping point of assimilation.

I see no point after which the fact that I speak Turkish will cease to be comment-worthy, and when making a pun or joke about popular culture will be seen as something natural — and hopefully funny — rather than just cute. There’s no point after which I’ll be a fellow member of the Turkish nation rather than a foreigner making an admirable effort.

Or, maybe this is what assimilation feels like. A strange clamber up a down escalator by a late-comer while becoming increasingly disconnected from the culture you left behind.

What’s an assimilation tipping point in your own life and your current culture?

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Valerie Taşıran teaches academic writing at Koç University in Istanbul.
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